Colorado Shooting - How horrible!

[mom'sfolly]

Any one who has dealt with a family member who has mental illness can tell you that very little can be done without consent. At best, a 72 hour psych hold can be done, and then maybe, with consent a longer stay.

However, getting a 72 hour hold means the person must be a immediate threat to themselves or others...this means poised on a bridge, brandishing a loaded weapon kind of immediate. Anything else will not get the commitment. If you do get the commitment, and get the intervention, most insurance won't pay for it. It takes weeks to get medication levels correctly working, and it is very hard to keep the person compliant, especially if they don't recognize the need for medication. It is a nasty, evil, rotten situation at the very best. The stress and emotional toll of trying to get someone the help they desperately need is awful.

As for all the comments about someone who had a concealed handgun taking this guy out...hogwash. Almost no one has been in a combat situation, which this was, and therefore have no idea of how s/he would react. For all we know there may have been other armed people in the theater, but they decided not to return fire. In a loud, dark theater, with a masked gunman and at least 70 rounds fired, none of us can predict how we or others might react. Second guessing what went on there, and saying that A, B or C would have changed the situation is idle speculation. So for all of you who say you could have handled it better...NONSENSE! Untried, untested, nonsense!

 

[Q9]

Any one who has dealt with a family member who has mental illness can tell you that very little can be done without consent. At best, a 72 hour psych hold can be done, and then maybe, with consent a longer stay.

However, getting a 72 hour hold means the person must be a immediate threat to themselves or others...this means poised on a bridge, brandishing a loaded weapon kind of immediate. Anything else will not get the commitment. If you do get the commitment, and get the intervention, most insurance won't pay for it. It takes weeks to get medication levels correctly working, and it is very hard to keep the person compliant, especially if they don't recognize the need for medication. It is a nasty, evil, rotten situation at the very best. The stress and emotional toll of trying to get someone the help they desperately need is awful.

As for all the comments about someone who had a concealed handgun taking this guy out...hogwash. Almost no one has been in a combat situation, which this was, and therefore have no idea of how s/he would react. For all we know there may have been other armed people in the theater, but they decided not to return fire. In a loud, dark theater, with a masked gunman and at least 70 rounds fired, none of us can predict how we or others might react. Second guessing what went on there, and saying that A, B or C would have changed the situation is idle speculation. So for all of you who say you could have handled it better...NONSENSE! Untried, untested, nonsense!

A single gunshot would have distracted him, even if it missed. A hit would have injured and quite possibly killed him. I've even heard that his "body armor" was in fact a tactical vest with little use as armor at all, in fact, though I need to substantiate that. If someone had returned fire, this would have ended differently. Even you can't deny that. Nobody's claiming they could've handled it better, because nobody was there to handle it in the first place. That's what we're saying. In addition, the guy had to stop to reload at numerous points, meaning that would have been an opportunity to get him even without a gun, and his AR-15 jammed at one point, providing yet another opportunity.

By the way, this theater was a gun-free zone, and since CC holders tend to be law-abiding, it's safe to assume that everybody was unarmed.

You know what nonsense is? Saying that everyone should be completely helpless in an event like this. If people like you had their way - and you've made it abundantly clear in previous threads where you stand on this - if you had your way, we'd all have to either escape or die, with no way to respond effectively, and wait on our Mighty Protectors to come and scrape up what's left of our corpses.

 

[rebelcowboysnb]

The people that did not run were military, some war veterans. Na they would have had no idea what to do. Good thing that sign disarmed them..... They were so better off laying down on there friends an being shot...

 

[mom'sfolly]

Thank you Q9, for putting words into my mouth....I never said everyone would have been completely helpless

What I said is we don't know how anyone with a gun would have reacted, we don't know how the shooter would have reacted to being fired at (after all, a loud movie was no distraction), we don't know. Anything else is speculation.

It was a loud movie, then there was gas/smoke and an armed gunman...and people died.

As for reloading...no credible report says the gunman reloaded. They say he started with the shotgun, switched to the AR-15 (which according to reports had a 100 round magazine) and when that jammed switched guns again.

Saying the results would have been different if better armed, more courageous people had been there undermines the horror, loss and terror of the situation. It turns a tragedy into a game for arm chair quarterbacks. Speculating about what could have gone differently is not productive. In my opinion, speculation is also disrespectful to those who died, and to those who fought to survive and see their loved ones again.

In glorifying the shooter, and focusing on him, his guns, and how perfectly brave we all could have been, we make this a platform for whatever demented motive he had.

 

[rebelcowboysnb]

As for reloading...no credible report says the gunman reloaded.

You mean like a picture of the AR with a bannana clip in it while everyone involved said it started with a drum mag that was found in the floor.

 

[mom'sfolly]

Also, for a point of comparison...the Fort Hood shooting. It happened in broad daylight. At least four trained people tried to stop the shooter, and yes they were unarmed, which is policy on American military bases. One person returned fire, was shot by Hasan and disarmed. The death toll there was 13. I chose the Wikipedia link because it was the easiest. Try the Austin American Statesman for more coverage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hood_shooting

We don't know what would have happened in Colorado. I pretty sure that at Fort Hood, if more of the soldiers would have been armed, Hasan would not be on trial today.

 

[Gigiintheforest]

I want this killer on trial. The families deserve justice that is meted out by a civilized nation - not the "justice" of an OK Corral type of mentality. I hope we've not descended that far into vigilantism.

Come on..."People like you?" I thought this was also a nation of free speech. It's okay to have different perspectives (or at least I thought it was). I will never own a gun or shoot someone PERIOD! That's what my belief system is and that's my right no matter what someone else may think of that stance.

 

[Ferrret]

Having learned a friend was in theater 9 where the shooting occurred, I watched the interview he did the day after the incident. From that interview some things were clarified.
Many of the people giving statements directly after the tragedy unfolded were in theater 8, right next to theater 9, and they were the ones with the gun battle scene that was loud and constantly changing between light and dim. Theater 9 was perhaps 10 minutes behind theater 8, and he said they had hit a quiet, slow moment in the movie, and that is when James Holmes made his entrance and started his massacre.

If the signs of mental illness were present, many in Colorado might not have known that he was behaving differently from normal. Most of his family and friends were in California, the people that would have been able to point out his change and perhaps direct him to help were too far away to even know for sure that he was different. His mother may have only know that her son had become a drastically different person, and her fears that he might do something awful were confirmed when she learned of the shooting.
Calling on the mother to explain herself is rather harsh. She may not be completely surprised by his actions, but that doesn't mean that she isn't hurt by what her son has become.

How he managed to afford all of this is a question worth finding an answer to. Was he abusing student loans? Did he have a savings account set aside? Was he doing something illegal such as dealing drugs? There has been rumor that part of what he was studying was the effects of psychoactive drugs, which may have led to manufacturing and selling drugs. He is said to be a very intelligent individual, and with his elaborate plot, I can believe that. Being intelligent, however, doesn't stop someone from being mentally ill, and sometimes it can make them much more dangerous.


Rebel, even if the servicemen were permitted to carry a gun in the theater, there is no guarantee that they would have. They had no reason to assume there would be a need for a gun within a movie theater. They may be trained to handle such situations, but there is no promise that they wouldn't be just as surprised and taken off guard by it.

Going back and forth over whether someone with a CC gun would have saved the day or not only gets people upset. It's one of those issues where people will never agree, they will simply rehash the same arguments until they get tired and stop responding. The discussion won't change because we can't know if it would have been different. As far as I am aware, there is no technology to examine alternate universes and the outcomes of events when a small factor was changed.
There are a lot of 'what if' scenarios that could have led to a different outcome, but we will never know for sure if it would have actually changed anything about what happened. He didn't even know what would happen with his own plot. The way he set his apartment, he predicted the police, or someone else, would go there and end up triggering the bombs. That didn't happen, his prediction was wrong, and his plan didn't work as intended.
We can 'but what if...' all day and night for years, but we'll never truly know what would actually happen.

 

[Gigiintheforest]

"Going back and forth over whether someone with a CC gun would have saved the day or not only gets people upset. It's one of those issues where people will never agree..."

So agree, Ferret. I'm bowing out.

 

[rebelcowboysnb]

Rebel, even if the servicemen were permitted to carry a gun in the theater, there is no guarantee that they would have. They had no reason to assume there would be a need for a gun within a movie theater. They may be trained to handle such situations, but there is no promise that they wouldn't be just as surprised and taken off guard by it.

No guarantee of anything but the military I know carry allot an did everywhere for a long time after getting home. As for how they reacted, the ones that have talked so far said they were taken off guard but didn't react badly.